A New Epic in Theme, Treatment --and Heft : Fiction: Publishers dare to compare Vikram Seth’s tale of 1950s India to the great works of the 19th Century. In England, critics are gushing about it--all 1,349 pages.

Vikram Seth bursts into the offices of his British publisher. He is late, disheveled, apologetic, sickly, hoarse and in need of black coffee-- “strong, with lots of sugar.”

Just back from a photo shoot, the celebrated Indian writer has this interview before racing across London for a book signing at Harrods,lunch with bookstore executives and more publicity appearances.

He’ll catch the evening train to Cambridge, where he’ll read from his new novel, “A Suitable Boy.”

Seth settles down behind a desk, grabs a blanket curiously situated nearby and drapes it over his head and torso, vanishing completely under the bright fabric.

“Go ahead,” comes his muffled voice.

This should be interesting.

He pulls the covering from his head, all smiles. Just kidding.

Where humor might have abandoned others thrown into the grinding gears of a fully revved publicity machine, Seth has managed to retain his wit and playfulness through the wearisome task of dealing with the massive hype that has accompanied the arrival of his epic work.

The new book, which sets the story of four families against the social and political upheaval of post-independence India, has generated as much hoopla for its length as its literary brilliance.

At 1,349 pages, it is said to be the longest English-language novel since Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa” in 1747 and outdoes “War and Peace” by 200 pages. It is as unusual and commercially risky in its way as Seth’s last work, “The Golden Gate,” a novel-in-verse about Bay Area yuppies, which he wrote while working and studying at Stanford University in the mid-1980s.

His British and American publishers, Orion and HarperCollins, whose combined advances garnered Seth $1 million, launched “A Suitable Boy” with vociferous comparisons to the great novels and novelists of the 19th Century--”War and Peace,” “Middlemarch” and “Vanity Fair,” Tolstoy, Eliot and Thackeray.

Anthony Cheetham, chief executive at Orion and a veteran of British publishing, said that when he came across “A Suitable Boy,” he decided “it was the best novel I’d ever seen in my career.”

His staff, mapping out strategy for promoting the book, felt comparisons with the 19th-Century greats were in order. But they recognized the potential for backlash.

“We thought, ‘Dare we say this?”’ said Cheetham. “In the end, we did.”

When the novel was published in Britain at the end of March, the critics were lying in wait.

And, yes, they lampooned the pre-publication puffery. But they were nearly unrelenting in their praise of the book.

“It is a work in the tradition of 19th-Century realism, filtered through a late 20th-Century sensibility,” said The Times of London. “ . . . at the age of 41, Vikram Seth is already the best writer of his generation.”

Seth is troubled by these accolades, even if they are now coming from reviewers and not his publishers. “These comparisons, from my point of view, they’re ludicrous,” he says. “They don’t help me. If I were to start thinking of myself in those terms I probably wouldn’t write another word. I’d probably feel awed by it.”

But the sweeping scale of his novel, and his ability to flesh out a huge cast of characters while submerging them in the events that shaped their place and time, do suggest a literary style long out of fashion.

Covering the years 1950 to 1952, the novel captures the era directly following the end of British rule, when India struggled to reinvent itself as an independent nation.

At its heart, “A Suitable Boy” is the story of Mrs. Rupa Mehra and her attempts to find a “suitable” husband for her daughter Lata. As the novel opens, there is a party to celebrate the arranged marriage of Lata’s sister.

Lata, who will soon find herself in a similarly arranged union if her mother has her way, reflects on how the couple barely know each other.

From there, the story spreads across the relationships that link four families, the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Khans and the Chatterjis, and ultimately examines the entire fabric of Indian life. The narrative traverses the worlds of Muslim and Hindu, commerce, politics, law and religion, from the upper echelons of society to the lives of the peasantry. There are a Ganges pilgrimage, a nasty political campaign, riots and love affairs. Seth did not set out to write such a weighty novel. “It began in my mind as a short book, the first of a series of five books,” he says. His saga, as he envisioned it, would start with India’s independence and continue to the present.

But as he began researching and writing the initial volume, the story grew and wandered, and he found himself captivated by a time period he had expected to find boring.

“It wasn’t plotted out as a masterwork,” he says. “It just grew. It was an adjustment--a continual adjustment.”

He worked on it for the next eight years, often spending 12 hours writing in longhand on his bed at his parents’ home in New Delhi before collapsing to sleep for 10 or 11 hours.

The novel contains “A Suitable Boy” deference to non-Indian readers. There are no explanations of Indian ways, no glossary of terms, no major foreign characters.

Seth says he avoided “exoticizing” his book. “Why would I falsify my novel simply to make it commercial?” he asks. “Clearly, given its bulk and so on, it wasn’t a very commercial proposition anyway.”

His publishers saw it differently. Orion in London bid $400,000 for the British rights while HarperCollins, which will publish the book Wednesday in the United States, paid $600,000.

They were aware they’d have to persuade readers to pick up not only one of the longest novels of all time but also one of the most expensive. It is among a very few novels to be priced at $30 in the United States and the first to sell for 20 pounds ($32) in Britain.

The book has topped the British bestseller list for the past five weeks. Cheetham says he will recoup his advance before the novel goes to paperback and predicts the book will be viewed as a classic, selling steadily for years to come.

HarperCollins has high expectations as well. The book has gone back to press for an additional 10,000 copies after a first printing of 50,000, said Bill Shinker, group vice president for trade books. “A Suitable Boy” is a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and after a few stops in Canada, Seth will begin a 12-city U.S. publicity tour on Sunday. (In Los Angeles, he will sign books and read at Dutton’s Brentwood from 7:30 to 9 p.m. Tuesday.)

The hectic job of selling “couldn’t be more different than the business of writing, which is so solitary,” Seth observes. After eight years of writing the novel, he says, he must “add one year for publicizing it and,” he laughs, “add one year for recuperation. Consider it a decade struck off my life.”

“A Suitable Boy” marks a complete change of direction in Seth’s career. But then, nearly everything he’s done has been a dramatic change from his previous life and work.

Born in Calcutta to a father in shoe manufacturing and a lawyer mother who became the first female chief justice in the Indian high court, Seth was educated at India’s top private school before winning a scholarship to Oxford. After earning a degree there in philosophy, politics and economics, he accepted a fellowship to study for a doctorate in economics at Stanford. In doing so, he turned down similar offers from Harvard and Yale.

While there, he became interested in China and was given a grant to carry out demographic/economic research at the University of Nanjing. After hitchhiking across China, Tibet and Nepal, he wrote a book about his travels, “From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet,” which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1983.

He confounded his publisher by next writing a book of poems, “The Humble Administrator’s Garden.”

Then, inspired by the structure of Aleksandr Pushkin’s 1833 masterpiece, “Eugene Onegin,” Seth wrote “The Golden Gate,” entirely in iambic tetrameter, winning critical acclaim and commercial success for the work which successfully mixed antiquated form with contemporary content:

They drive across to Sausalito

Later, divide a vile burrito

From Taco Hut, and wash it down

With a Dos Equis, cool and brown

Seth also took inspiration from Pushkin in switching from “genre to genre. He never allowed people to say to him ‘You’ve done this great thing, why don’t you do it again?’ ” says Seth. “He just did what he wanted to do.” Seth’s next moves will take him in new directions. He has completed the libretto for an opera, “Arion and the Dolphin,” to be performed under the auspices of the English National Opera in 1994. And he plans to move to the East Coast of the United States to write plays.

But poetry remains his love and the form shows up periodically in “A Suitable Boy.” The table of contents, for example, is written in rhyming couplets.

And in his dedication, he offers these thanks to family, sources of inspiration and all readers who attempt his massive work:

To these I owe a debt past telling

My several muses, harsh and kind;

My folks, who stood my sulks and yelling,

And (in the long run) did not mind;

Dead legislators, whose orations

I’ve filched to mix my own potations;

Indeed, all those whose brains I’ve pressed,

Unmerciful, because obsessed;

My own dumb soul, which on a pittance

Survived to weave this fictive spell;

And, gentle reader, you as well,

The fountainhead of all remittance.

Buy me before good sense insists

You’ll strain your purse and sprain your wrists .